Johan and I were overjoyed: last week Last.fm sent us to the Hadoop Summit 2008 in Santa Clara, California. Under Johan's wings Last.fm became one of the earliest adopters of Doug Cutting's Hadoop, and I'm a frequent user myself. And we had an excellent time. The conference was great as expected, we had lots of interesting conversations with people from all kinds of backgrounds. Additionally we spent the rest of our trip meeting people from other companies (Facebook, Powerset, and others), discussing technology (we're currently really interested in HBase), the various issues that arise from having to cope with …

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I'm start to look into more secure ways to store sensitive data, and Apple's encrypted DMG disk images seem like a good compromise between security and convenience. If you're worried about long-term storage and retrievability it of course has the disadvantage of being a proprietary format, which means you would need an OS X machine to decrypt those disk images. Not any more! In one of the interesting talks I missed during last year's 23C3 (while being busy doing other things) Jacob Appelbaum, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and David Hulton presented their successful attempt to reverse-engineer the file format. They provide slides …

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Since I got my PowerBook early last year I'm on the search for decent alternatives to some of the applications I was using on the PC. Thanks to a flourishing development community I found replacements for the most important stuff (and more), but one thing that is still missing is a decent multi-track audio editor suitable for music production. I've been using Samplitude on the PC for the last couple of years, which after a brief learning curve turned out to be perfect for my needs -- it offers quite elegant means of editing audio, including non-destructive filters and timestretching …

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I've been suffering from a minor iTunes annoyance for a while now and finally decided to look into it: There is no 'clean' way to import an audio podcast file into your main library. Audio files that come from a podcast feed are treated differently to 'normal' audio files in a number of ways, and sometimes that's not what you want. The simplest solution in most cases is of course to re-download the file from a browser or the commandline -- but in my case that didn't work because the file was no longer online. And dragging it to the …

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While reading this: Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. ... and re-reading this: The data technologies powering Google Reader can easily be used and extended by third-party feed aggregators for use in their own applications. ... it struck me: centralized aggregation, decentralized delivery and UI the hardest part in a reader (IMHO) is aggregation, because it offers a lot of pitfalls with little reward for making it "just work" more interesting: the visible stuff solves bandwidth issues for everybody solves stability issues for everybody saves costs for the developer/hoster (these …

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I previously mentioned the all-Ruby Jabber server xmppd, a new project that is going to be really interesting once it's above a certain basic threshold -- a core goal of this project is to get to a stage where you simply start a script to get the server running, with minimum configuration and no root privileges required. As I'm a fan of such low-barrier-to-entry, low-dependencies software (cf. SQLite) I'm tingling with anticipation. I just found that a similar project has recently been launched in the Perl space, initiated by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal and Flickr fame. This project is called …

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NetNewsWire's developer Brent Simmons has silently been busy during the last couple of months, and is now starting to talk about his progress. And my guess was right: the major new feature is NewsGator integration. Don't want to dismiss it though, it seems that among numerous bug fixes we can also expect significant speed improvements on some operations. The main surprise to me, though, was this particular announcement: P.S. It's a free upgrade. In fact, existing NetNewsWire users will get two years of free upgrades plus a free subscription to NewsGator. Whow. Another OS X developer being crazy friendly with …

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I just wanted to check out the beta of Ableton Live 5.2 -- since switching to a Mac last year I haven't found a decent audio sequencer yet that I could actually afford, and had been hearing great stuff about their recent improvements. Well what can I say: I didn't get to actually use Live, because its copy protection mechanism sucks, and clashes badly with my stubborn viewpoints on privacy -- and then some. For example... When you start up the application for the first time it requests admin privileges?! After canceling this request you're informed that it just …

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I'm a pretty geeky guy, but there are quite a number of technological trends that I've known for a long time before I actually start using them, and where I simply don't know how much I'm missing. A particular field of software that suffers from this is communication software: namely instant messaging and voice-over-IP. I had an ICQ account in the 90ies (when I was working at SinnerSchrader in Hamburg), but basically used it to make lunch plans with a buddy and not much else. Well that has finally changed. Within weeks I got a new ICQ account, a …

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Slick, Libre Charts? Either there is no great, simple application for well-designed charts and numeric diagrams on OS X, or it's amazingly well hidden -- all I want to do is transform tables of numbers (and text labels) into beautiful visualizations. Like in Excel, only good-looking. I don't even care about the output format. Keynote only works for small data sets, and all free/open source applications I've looked into suck (examples). As an alternative I thought about scripting Inkscape, but haven't yet looked into it. Gruff on the other hand is often too limited for what I want to …

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I've been submitting feature requests and bug reports to the NetNewsWire forum -- Brent Simmons seems pretty responsive. I'm looking forward to an application update, it's been months since 2.01 was released, and I'm wondering what Brent's working on (probably mainly NewsGator integration, which at the moment is of little use to me.) The more I'm using the application the more I'm finding its limitations -- it's still the best aggregator for the Mac (though Vienna is getting closer and closer), but sometimes I'm a bit envious of the Windows world where FeedDemon is making great strides lately. I'm …

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I make a lot of little notes in text files that never develop into a full article and eventually get deleted. So to change that, and to maybe even increase the post frequency a bit, I'll start publishing smaller comments. Have no idea yet which way suits me best though; first approach: assemble several semi-connected commentaries to get to article length. TextMate 2.0, which I guess won't be released within the next six months, will be a free update for registered users of TextMate 1.x -- a bold financial decision for the developer Allan Odgaard, but great for his users. …

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There currently are quite a number of very happy reactions over the announcement that Telestream's product Flip4Mac WMV is now available for free -- Flip4Mac WMV is a collection of "Windows Media® Components for QuickTime" that allows you to play certain Windows Media formats from within Quicktime, among them apparently some older formats that Microsoft's Media Player 9 for OS X can't play (I'm not actually sure about that, but this seems to be a reason why people install it -- that and the fact that MS has just discontinued their own Media Player.) It's curious that there is a …

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This documents how Apache 1.3 on OS X can be set up to serve .rhtml files using Ruby's ERB template system. Most of the required configuration is already described in Brian Bugh's article Using ERB/rhtml Templates On Dreamhost, but OS X's basic setup is conservative enough to require a little additional configuration. However the real reason I'm writing this is that I additionally wanted to limit the handling of .rhtml scripts to my user account's "personal web sharing" directory (which maps to a tilde URL like http://127.0.0.1/~username/), and this isn't as straight-forward, so it took me a while to …

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Recently there have been a number of requests for new ideas in the aggregator market, and as I'm constantly dissatisfied with my feed consumption experience (no matter the tool) I have lots of opinions on the state of aggregator software -- and even some ideas for improvement. I'll save the grand overview for later; because some things are better shown than told I thought a good start would be to show sketches of what I'd like to see in the next generation of aggregators. Here's Sketch One, which is kind of an accumulation of concepts, and which describes the basis …

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I just updated to 10.4.3, and after the first reboot Little Snitch reported a network request by Dock.app to apple.com -- something which had never happened before. The first time I let it slip, but the second request came when I opened Dashboard for the first time, and this time I started tcpdump before granting access. Among the expected traffic (updating the weather forecast) was a rather unusual request: 22:19:57.059318 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 27097, offset 0, flags [DF], length: 147) 192.168.0.4.50428 > www.apple.com.http: P [tcp sum ok] 1:108(107) ack 1 win 65535 0x0000: ..[.q>..$..^..E. 0x0010: ..i.@.@......... …

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Chris Zumbrunn has news in the comments of my article "RFE: Server-Side Javascript?": There is a new JavaScript execution framework called Rhinola which looks like what I asked for: a framework that enables server-side JavaScript web development! A quick search leads to an enthusiastic article ("whoa! rhinola rocks!") on the haboglabobloggin' blog (which just went offline while I was writing this...), but the author mentions that the current incarnation of the software requires quite some Linux admin-fu to get it working; I assume this will change over the next year as the product matures. Rhinola is currently based on the …

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Translation: The file 'iTunes Library' apparently is not a valid music library. iTunes has attempted to rebuild your music library and renamed this file 'iTunes Library (Damaged)'. Net result: the music is still there, but I have to manually reconstruct all podcast subscriptions... if I can even remember them. Otherwise: good luck reading the proprietary database format. Damn. Serves me right for being such a curious bastard. Note to self: next time wait. Let others do the mistakes of an early update. Update: Ok, I think I got them all. After about the third podcast I realized that Google …

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Judging from the screenshots, iTunes 5 has put an end to Brushed Metal!! Haven't installed it yet myself, but I'll take it as a sign for good things to come in 10.4.3. I'm also curious what other changes have lead to the major version jump -- let's hope they have made some improvements to the podcasting workflow. Judging from the feature overview page the sources list can now have folders, which is a really useful addition. And what the hell does this mean: "now supports iPod syncing for Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows PCs"?? …

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While playing around with the cool new <canvas>-tag, I found that Safari seems to have a bug in its canvas implementation -- it stops working as soon as you link an external style sheet to the HTML, even if the style sheet is empty. I'm not sure yet if this is an actual bug or if I'm overlooking something; but then, nobody is actually using <canvas> on styled production sites, and all the demos I saw online are using unstyled HTML, so it's not that unreasonable that it's not a well-known bug. Update: I posted this to the webkit-dev mailing …

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I already gave a basic description of Pandora in my previous article, "Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm". Brief recapitulation: Pandora is a music streaming service that lets you control the kind of music that is played. You can define "stations" by bookmarking song titles or artist names, and the site then plays music that shares similar properties with your selected songs. In contrast to Last.fm, which is a social network, Pandora builds on a concept of rich metadata to find relationships between individual songs. This time I had the opportunity to actually use the system, so this should make an …

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Tom Conrad has apparently just presented "Pandora" at Bar Camp. Scoble quotes an email from Tom with a short description of the service: "Pandora is a "music discovery service" designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a "station" that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations …

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I've just started using TextMate. My initial assumption was that it is still early in the development process, so I planned to wait for a later release before I would decide if I should register a copy; but then I started using it for a couple of days and found several functions that blew me away. A tip of the day introduced the "^R" shortcut that executes the current line as shell script and inserts the output into your document; this is quite useful to me as I'm starting to use the shell and especially shell scripts for various text …

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Via Dave Winer: Apple seems to be caching podcast feeds and MP3 files as part of their iTunes podcast integration. The Dailysonic blog gives several reasons why this is bad for the content producers, and could even cost them money. In a nutshell: Podcast producers need their subscriber numbers for the advertisers. And, worst of all from a listener perspective: The caching mechanism seems yet to be unreliable, which means that some podcasts never reach the listener. Hm, I see... I was wondering how Apple were keeping track of their subscriber count. Routing it over their servers makes sense for …

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miniplayer is a minimal interface plugin for musikCube. it has basic player controls, a search field, it can access your playlists, there is a simple behavior-controlled suggestion mechanism (which is just a fancy way of saying "SQL query"), and a couple of small things that make life easier. I probably like the search field the most. type in a word and hit enter: the search result is sent to "now playing", and miniplayer immediately starts playback. instant gratification. if no songs are found the search field keeps focus, so you can correct your query and try again. I still have …

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"I Like This!" is a simple music recommendation plugin for the musikCube audio player. With this plugin musikCube users can recommend their favorite songs and net radio stations while they are playing in musikCube; all recommendations are then listed on this site. I's an easy way to share your musical taste with others, and to give others new ideas on what kind of music there is. It is also a proof-of-concept: an attempt to show how easy it is to develop a musikCube-plugin that uses xml-rpc to communicate with a remote computer. This opens up a whole space of new …

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Designed as a replacement for the Windows text editor Notepad, Florian Balmer's Notepad2 is a small, fast, simple and beautiful open source application. Along with an impressive set of basic text editing features it provides several useful tools and lots of neat little helpers that will improve virtually all text editing experiences, both for the programmer and the occasional user. Notepad2 has a nice interface with well-designed icons. It provides customizable syntax highlighting for many file types: all major programming languages (including perl and python), various file types relevant for web development, along with some rather exotic ones like XUL, …

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I've just spent several hours looking for a free or open source hex editor, and it is surprising how many editors there are, and how few are worth checking out. I didn't think I would ask for much: a simple standard interface and the ability to open large files. I must have looked at more than 50 websites and installed nearly 20 applications, until I found HexEdit from Catch22 Productions. I have used the free version of ECS HexEdit for quite a while, but its nag screen and ancient interface started to bug me. xvi32 is a nice editor, and …

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Alex Moffat has created a wonderful little tool to rapidly create UML sequence diagrams. The GPL licensed Java application, appropriately named "Sequence", creates diagrams from short sequence descriptions and allows you to export them to a PNG file. Sequence can't replace more sophisticated applications like TogetherJ or Visio, lacking e.g. support for asynchronous messages, but serves well as a small tool for quick sketches. You can literally design your first diagram seconds after downloading the Jar file. Example of a small sequence diagram: Loading a media file via the user interface. The MediaPlayer class notifies its caller of the properties …

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